Gala-Days [53]
can be committed, as well as one of the greatest blunders that can he made. The man who can do such a thing is a liar and a perjurer. I can understand that people should give up the people they love, but there is no possible shadow of excuse for their taking people whom they don't love. It is no matter how inferior Jane may be to Frederic. A woman can feel a good many things that she cannot analyze or understand, and there never yet was a woman so stupid that she did not know whether or not her husband loved her, and was not either stricken or savage to find that he did not. No woman ever was born with a heart so small that anything less than the whole of her husband's heart could fill it.
Moreover, apart from unhappy consequences, there is a right and a wrong about it. How dare a man stand up solemnly before God and his fellows with a lie in his right hand? and if he does do it, how dare a poet or a novelist step up and glorify him in it? The man who commits a crime does not do so much mischief as the man who turns the criminal into a hero. Frederic Graham did a weak, wicked, mean, and cowardly deed, not being in his general nature weak, wicked, mean, or cowardly, and was allowed to blunder on to a tolerable sort of something like happiness in the end. No one has a right to complain, for all of us get a great deal more and better than we deserve. We have no right to complain of Providence, but we have a right to complain of the poet who comes up and says not a word in reprobation of the meanness and cowardice, not a word of the cruelty inflicted upon Jane, nor the wrong done to his own soul; but veils the wickedness, excites our sympathy and pity, and in fact makes Frederic out to be a sort of sublime and suffering martyr. He was no martyr at all. Nobody is a martyr, if he cannot help himself. If Frederic had the least spirit of martyrdom, he would have breasted his sorrow manfully and alone. Instead of which, he shuffled himself and his misery upon poor simple Jane, getting all the solace he could from her, and leading her a wretched, almost hopeless life for years. This is what we are to admire! This is the knight without reproach! This is to be Faithful Forever! I suppose Coventry Patmore thinks Frederic is to be commended because he did not break into Honoria's house and run away with her. That is the only thing he could have done worse than he did do, and that I have no doubt he would have done if he could. I have no faith in the honor or the virtue of men or women who will marry where they do not love. I think it is just as sinful--and a thousand times as vile--to marry unlovingly, as to love unlawfully.[*]
[*] Some one just here suggests that it was Jane who was faithful forever, not Frederic. That indeed makes the title appropriate, but does not relieve the atrocity of the plot.
There is this about mountains,--you cannot get away from them. Low country may be beautiful, yet you may be preoccupied and pass through it or by it without consciousness; but the mountains rise, and there is no escape. Representatives of an unseen force, voices from an infinite past, benefactors of the valleys, themselves unblest, almoners of a charity which leaves them in the heights indeed, but the heights of eternal desolation, raised above all sympathies, all tenderness, shining but repellent, grand and cold, mighty and motionless,--we stand before them hushed. They fix us with their immutability. They shroud us with their Egyptian gloom. They sadden. They awe. They overpower. Yet far off how different is the impression! Bright and beautiful, evanescent yet unchanging, lovely as a spirit with their clear, soft outlines and misty resplendence! Exquisitely says Winthrop: "There is nothing so refined as the outline of a distant mountain; even a rose-leaf is stiff-edged and harsh in comparison. Nothing else has that definite indefiniteness, that melting permanence, that evanescing changelessness. [I did not know that I was using his terms.] Clouds in vain strive to imitate it; they are made of slighter
Moreover, apart from unhappy consequences, there is a right and a wrong about it. How dare a man stand up solemnly before God and his fellows with a lie in his right hand? and if he does do it, how dare a poet or a novelist step up and glorify him in it? The man who commits a crime does not do so much mischief as the man who turns the criminal into a hero. Frederic Graham did a weak, wicked, mean, and cowardly deed, not being in his general nature weak, wicked, mean, or cowardly, and was allowed to blunder on to a tolerable sort of something like happiness in the end. No one has a right to complain, for all of us get a great deal more and better than we deserve. We have no right to complain of Providence, but we have a right to complain of the poet who comes up and says not a word in reprobation of the meanness and cowardice, not a word of the cruelty inflicted upon Jane, nor the wrong done to his own soul; but veils the wickedness, excites our sympathy and pity, and in fact makes Frederic out to be a sort of sublime and suffering martyr. He was no martyr at all. Nobody is a martyr, if he cannot help himself. If Frederic had the least spirit of martyrdom, he would have breasted his sorrow manfully and alone. Instead of which, he shuffled himself and his misery upon poor simple Jane, getting all the solace he could from her, and leading her a wretched, almost hopeless life for years. This is what we are to admire! This is the knight without reproach! This is to be Faithful Forever! I suppose Coventry Patmore thinks Frederic is to be commended because he did not break into Honoria's house and run away with her. That is the only thing he could have done worse than he did do, and that I have no doubt he would have done if he could. I have no faith in the honor or the virtue of men or women who will marry where they do not love. I think it is just as sinful--and a thousand times as vile--to marry unlovingly, as to love unlawfully.[*]
[*] Some one just here suggests that it was Jane who was faithful forever, not Frederic. That indeed makes the title appropriate, but does not relieve the atrocity of the plot.
There is this about mountains,--you cannot get away from them. Low country may be beautiful, yet you may be preoccupied and pass through it or by it without consciousness; but the mountains rise, and there is no escape. Representatives of an unseen force, voices from an infinite past, benefactors of the valleys, themselves unblest, almoners of a charity which leaves them in the heights indeed, but the heights of eternal desolation, raised above all sympathies, all tenderness, shining but repellent, grand and cold, mighty and motionless,--we stand before them hushed. They fix us with their immutability. They shroud us with their Egyptian gloom. They sadden. They awe. They overpower. Yet far off how different is the impression! Bright and beautiful, evanescent yet unchanging, lovely as a spirit with their clear, soft outlines and misty resplendence! Exquisitely says Winthrop: "There is nothing so refined as the outline of a distant mountain; even a rose-leaf is stiff-edged and harsh in comparison. Nothing else has that definite indefiniteness, that melting permanence, that evanescing changelessness. [I did not know that I was using his terms.] Clouds in vain strive to imitate it; they are made of slighter